I have a SONY DRU500A Drive. I have upgraded to firmware 2.0. It shows that I am burning at 4X but it takes about 55-60 Minutes to burn one complete DVD (4.3 Gigs). I am backing up a DVD (original in DVD drive and Blank in burner.) Can someone please help. I have tried the PIO thing and DMA settings. No Luck. My hardware is as follows. AMD 1800+ 256MB Ram 120GIG HD DRU500A & DVD Drive hooked up together to one IDE port on MOtherboard Sony - DRU - MAster DVD - Slave
Are you making an image on the HDD of the source DVD first? If not, do that. If the data rate to the drive is not high enough, the burning speed drops. Another thing that might help is to attach the burner to different IDE channels.
I've run across this same problem with a Sony drive. In a recent batch of Verbatim discs marked as 4x, about 80% burnt at 4x, the rest burnt at some slower speed. No coasters. My opinion is that Sony's drives are too picky about the media. I can't find any other pattern to the differences, as all the discs were from the same lot.
I have this problem as well, and it seems indeed to be a common problem with Sony DRU500. I think it's a drive problem. Anyway, while burning a +RW disk I started another CPU consuming task and the burning speed dropped. That's why I'd recommend checking the system first. The second thing to do is to check the media: I'd leave out cheap media for 4x burning, at least with the Sony. I had almost no luck with Princo 4x. I still have to try other brands. Sony has on its site a list of certified media for DVD burners, which includes Verbatim 4x. I'd expect this media to be burnt always at 4x, provided the system can keep up to the data rate needed. I will return my drive if it won't burn certified media at 4x.
